The Book Club. Mary Monroe Alice

      Midge liked to think her place was a statement of her dedication to talent, not fashion. But she could tell by the expression on her mother’s face that she saw it as a decorator’s worst nightmare. Her breath held, however, when her mother’s gaze alighted on the wall-size paintings that filled the west wall of the loft. Midge felt about her work as any mother would when someone inspected her children. Or for some people, their dog. She waited in a tense silence.

      “Could you get Prince a bowl of water, dear?” Edith asked, turning to face her with a starched smile on her face.

      Midge’s breath hitched. Edith had nothing to say about her paintings. They were dismissed without notice or a word.

      “Sure,” she forced out, turning away so her mother wouldn’t see her disappointment. “How about some wine for you? I’ve uncorked a nice bottle of Margaux.”

      “Oh no, dear, I never drink red wine anymore. Those sulfites give me a headache. Please say you have a martini? Vodka? With a lemon peel?”

      Midge closed her eyes against the headache that was already forming in her temples. “No lemons, but I’ve got olives.”

      Edith sighed with disappointment. “That’ll do, I suppose.”

      Midge gritted her teeth and plopped an olive in Prince’s water, too. She hoped the little bugger would choke on it.

      After the martini was served and she was fortified with a glass of the Margaux, Midge felt her equilibrium slowly return. They briefly discussed Edith’s flight to Chicago, the books she’d been reading, her bridge game, the nasty change in weather—safe topics that broke the ice. The conversation moved up a notch when her mother complained about how her grandchildren’s manners were shocking. “It’s like eating a meal with animals!” she said, slipping Prince a dog treat. The dog chewed the biscuit with noisy relish, dropping crumbs all over Midge’s sofa with fearless abandon.

      As the sky darkened and a second drink was poured, Edith relaxed by slipping off her jacket, easing back into the sofa’s cushions and announcing that she found her condo in southern Florida utterly confining and the life-style boring.

      “There’s no culture,” Edith said, plucking out the olive with a wrinkled nose. “There’s no there there. Florida’s great if you like to walk on the beach every morning and pick thousands of shells. But after you’ve done that…” She rolled her eyes. “C’est tout! Besides, I miss my old friends.”

      “You’ve made new ones.” Midge wasn’t feeling sympathetic. Her mother had been hell-bent to move to Florida years back, dragging her back and forth to help find the condo, all the while professing that she couldn’t endure another Chicago winter.

      “Everyone’s too old down there,” Edith continued. “One foot in the grave. And there’s not a decent man to be found. They’re all either hobbling around or married. I’m lonely for some male companionship. And I’ll tell you,” she added, perking up, “the man I saw in the airport bar…” She rolled her eyes suggestively, then sipped daintily from her martini, closing her eyes and almost purring. “Oh làlà.”

      Midge shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the notion of her mother scouting out babes in the bar. There was something smarmy about listening to one’s own mother’s love stories—especially when she herself didn’t have any.

      “Please tell me you didn’t try to pick him up….”

      “No,” she replied with an incredulous expression, “another woman met him there, probably his wife.” She tsked, then leaned farther back into the sofa’s cushions and looked long and hard through a drunken haze at her daughter. “But what if I had? What would be so wrong with that? Do you think because I’m of a certain age I can’t attract a man any longer? Or, God forbid, that I don’t want one?”

      “No, Mother, but there’s such a thing as dignity.”

      Edith threw back her head and laughed a throaty laugh. “I think we have more than enough of that in you for one family. You’d do well to drop a little of yours, darling, and go out and mingle more. Shake it up. It’s no wonder you haven’t met a decent man. You’ll never find anyone if you don’t hunt.”

      “Maybe I don’t want to hunt for anyone.”

      Edith waved her hand dismissively. “Of course you do, honey. You’re just too shy. You keep your nose stuck in your paints. Stick by your mama, I’ll show you a few tricks of the trade.”

      She clicked her tongue and ran her palm along her hips in what she clearly thought was a sexy move. Midge thought she was going to be sick. In a flash she remembered the first time she’d come home from Boston College. It was parents’ weekend and her mother didn’t want to come out East just to hang around a bunch of rah-rahrahing freshman parents. So Midge decided to fly home to surprise her. And, too, because she didn’t want to hang around the dorms while all the other freshmen’s parents were getting tours, participating in events and taking their kids out to dinner. When her mother had opened the front door, however, she was not happy to see her. Why are you here? she’d asked in a heated whisper, then looked over her shoulder into the house. Grabbing her purse, she’d closed the door behind her and, stuffing a few twenties into her hand, told Midge to go to the Carlyle Hotel in town. She had a houseguest. When Midge moaned and asked why she couldn’t just sleep in her own room, Edith merely rolled her eyes, clicked her tongue, and said with that same coy expression how her friend didn’t know she had a college-age daughter and she didn’t want him to know, either.